I’m breaking one of my rules of blogging and that is to write about a book before I’ve finished it. There are reasons and I may even finish the book at some time in the future but for now I plan to put it aside for a while and read other books. I find this book rather slow to read which is fine when I have time and not so fine when I need to read other books.

The Road Ahead by Bill Gates feels sci fi until you stop and think about his position in the world of computers. Gates is the man who introduced Windows to the world (although there is a rumour going round that Steve Jobs was there first but Gates pinched the idea and made it public first), he is also the man behind Microsoft. Therefore, he would be the man who knows so much about the future of computers/internet/information highway and would be in a position to make predictions.

Before I move on I need to state that this particular copy was published in 1995, a year when so much was about to happen and a year before so much more had happened. It’s the year of Windows 95 which changed our lives so much. I remember using a previous version, Windows 3.1 was pretty amazing but Windows 95 changed my life, all of a sudden I was able to use computers with much more ease, it was an operating system aimed at people like me who couldn’t remember commands and needed a much more visual medium in order to be able to use computers with ease. If it wasn’t for Windows 95 I’d still be sitting there reading books and not sharing with anyone, I’d still be sitting there without having sold books using online auction websites and I’d still be sitting there not knowing the joys of blogging.

In the start of this book Gates talks about the beginnings of the computer industry and how certain companies have failed and why they’ve failed. As in all businesses you need to be able to foresee the future correctly, An Wang of Wang Wordprocessors (I used one during some of my studies in the early 1980s)

left the calculator market just before the arrival of low-cost competition that would have ruined him…Wang reinvented his company to be the leading supplier of word-processing machines.

His vision failed him in the 1980s and his software was tied to his hardware, a move that destroyed many companies, those who survived well are those who made sure their software worked on many different types of hardware.

One thing I enjoyed reading was about video cassettes. There used to be two types, VHS and Beta. I’ve always thought that Beta tapes/machines weren’t as good and that’s why they went out of production but Gates tells us the tapes only recorded for one hour while VHS recorded for three hours, if your programme is only one hour long then that’s fine but movies are rarely less than 90 minutes, unless it’s a short.

One thing I’m pretty sure of is that Apple computers used to be better PCs and many Apple people will swear black and blue that is still the case but I’m not so sure any more. Apple i.e. Steve Jobs understood people and understood that you needed to make people feel good about the product and make them part of an elite which is why when you go to their shops for help you rarely get served immediately but have to make an appointment. Gates had thought highly of Jobs with this comment:

Steve has an amazing intuition for engineering and design as well as an ability to motivate people that is world class.

This ties up with my previous comment, Jobs understood that motivating people to buy is what is needed to have a company survive and so he created this culture.

I’ve said a lot about the book and the computer industry while vaguely touching on the Information Highway. This is a term I haven’t heard for many years and Gates talks about a lot. It’s something that he could foresee from the vantage point of 1995 and I’d suggest we’re there now. In 1995 you could get onto the internet but it cost a lot of money, you had a fairly slow modem with speeds of 14.4k (in 1999 when I got my first computer and first internet connection my modem was 36.6k, the fastest available at that time). You bought blocks of hours rather than paying by the month and stayed online as little as possible, we would attach the modem to the phone line, connect to the internet making it impossible for people to ring us during that time, do things as quickly as possible, sending all our email and downloading at the same time, doing whatever searching was possible in those days and then cutting the connection quickly to save our hours. All email was written offline and there was rarely such a thing as being online all the time. At that point Gates tells us we needed certain things in order for the Information Highway to happen, we needed things such as some method of searching (this is three years before Google was invented and only one year after Yahoo started), we also needed such things as an invoicing system (Paypal arose in 2000 out of Confinity which in 1995 was still three years away from launch), more bandwidth to facilitate faster download and much faster and more capable computers. All of these things are now here, I type this while connected to the internet and don’t have to worry about hogging the phone line…we pay a little more for our internet than I used to in 1999 but we are connected 24/7 rather than trying to get as many months as possible out of my 30 hours.

As a book this works well. It is now rather dated and this edition is only useful for information. I’ve found one which you can buy here published in 2008 which has updated information as at the end of 1995 but you really want to read this article which is divided up into six different articles so you can read the bits you want.